The Canadian Food
Inspection Agency has a $16-million budget to audit its own inspectors over the
next three years.
The agency announced on
its website that six teams of three “verification inspectors” each will begin
checking federally-inspected food-processing companies.
They will be checking things
such as plant sanitation and company protocols for food recalls.
Four more teams will be
added this fall.
Meanwhile, one of the
most effective audits of meat production and processing and CFIA inspection is
teams that come from other countries, such as the United States and the
European Union.
The foreign inspection
teams are accompanied by senior staff of the CFIA.
Yet they still fail to
identify some grievous shortcomings, such as a litany of issues revealed on
closer inspection after the largest beef recall in Canadian history at the XL
Foods Ltd. plant at Brooks, Alta.
Does anybody, such as CFIA's supervising veterinarians, lose employment when the audits reveal these major shortcomings? I haven't seen a single firing over 40 years of reporting horrendous situations.
